ssess the exalted purity of mind you and
many very young men attribute to them. They are, on the contrary, for
the most part quite ready to exercise a wise discretion in the matter
of marriage, even when the feeble tendencies which represent their
affections point another way. A little pressure goes a long way with
them; they are always glad to make the most of it; it is the dust they
throw up to hide their retreat. Your Angela, for instance, was no
doubt, and probably still is, very fond of you. You are a charming
young man, with nice eyes and a taking way with women, and she would
very much have liked to marry you; but then she also liked her
cousin's estates. She could not have both, and, being forced to
choose, she chose the latter. You should take a common-sense view of
the matter; you are not the first who has suffered. Women, especially
young women, who do not understand the value of affection, must be
very much in love before they submit to the self-sacrifice that is
supposed to be characteristic of them, and what men talk of as stains
upon them they do not consider as such. They know, if they know
nothing else, that a good income and an establishment will make them
perfectly clean in the opinion of their own small world--a little
world of shams and forms that cares nothing for the spirit of the
moral law, provided the letter is acted up to. It is by this that they
mark their standard of personal virtues, not by the high rule you men
imagine for them. There is no social fuller's soap so effectual as
money and position."

"You speak like a book, and give your own sex a high character. Tell
me, then, would you do such a thing?"

"I, Arthur? How can you ask me? I had rather be torn to pieces by wild
horses. I spoke of the majority of the women, not of them all."

"Ah, and yet she could do it, and I thought her better than you."

"I do not think that you should speak bitterly of her, Arthur; I think
that you should be sorry for her."

"Sorry for her? Why?"

"Because from what I have gathered about her, she is not quite an
ordinary young woman: however badly she may have treated you, she is a
person of refined feelings and susceptibilities. Is it not so?"

"Without a doubt."

"Well, then, you should pity her, because she will bitterly expiate
her mistake. For myself, I do not pity her much, because I will not
waste my sympathy on a fool; for, to my mind, the woman who could do
what she has done, and deliber